How AI and other tech are accelerating game development | Steven Collins interview

13.10.2023 - 14:06 / venturebeat.com / Ai

The acceleration of technological change is evident everywhere, and it’s benefiting games in unseen ways. In 2016, King had only 2,000 levels for Candy Crush Saga.

As the publisher King turns 20, there are now 15,000 levels for Candy Crush Saga, which has helped the company generate $20 billion in revenue and five billion downloads to date. The game had 238 million monthly active users in the second quarter.

One of the people responsible for making the tech happen at King is Steve Collins, CTO at the company. He has held that role since 2020, and he has more than 30 years of experience in entrepreneurship and leadership in the technology sector.

In his role at King, Collins leads the implementation of King’s technology strategy and the management of the shared technology team which is responsible for the centralized products, platforms and services that King has created to build and operate its live mobile games. 

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Before joining King, Collins was a partner at Frontline Ventures, a European VC Fund investing in technology start-ups, and prior to that was a founder and CTO of Havok, Kore and Swrve. Now he’s very focused on King’s cloud and machine learning strategies. (This is the sort of thing we’ll talk about at GamesBeat Next 2023 on October 23-24 in San Francisco; here’s a code for 25% off: deangbn2325)

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How long have you been at King now?

Steve Collins: I joined just before lockdown, so I started in 2020. My first act as CTO was to help us implement that transition. It was amazing to go through. A terrible time, obviously, but King was already a pretty digital-native organization. We adapted quickly to the new way of working.

In some ways it’s been interesting to be part of that transition. King now is very much in the hybrid mode. We allow each of our teams to figure out how they want to show up, and it’s been incredibly successful for us as an organization.

GamesBeat: Do you remember how big King was then? Has it grown significantly in the intervening years?

Collins: It probably has grown a certain amount, but we still–my team is the shared technology organization, where we invest heavily in a number of big initiatives, not the least of which is AI. We’re also going through a very large cloud transformation. We’re moving into the cloud as an organization, something we weren’t doing before I joined. We had migrated our data org to the cloud, but we’re in the process now of nearly completing that, which is quite incredible. We’ve gone from